Deep Freeze Read online

  “We can talk about it,” Duncan had said. Then, after promising to give Virgil’s phone number to Griffin and arranging for her to meet Virgil at Johnson Johnson’s cabin, he’d hung up.

  FIVE Virgil and his fishing buddy, Johnson Johnson, had met while playing baseball for the University of Minnesota. Virgil had been at third base while Johnson was a catcher. Johnson had been given his unusual first name by his father, Big Johnson, an outboard motor enthusiast who’d named both of his sons after his favorite outboards, Johnson and Mercury.

  “He liked to have a few drinks after his babies were born,” Johnson said. “That’s when he’d think up the names.”

  Johnson Johnson was tall and heavily built, like a proper catcher, and ran a hardwood lumber mill in the hills west of town. He’d once chivvied Virgil into Trippton to investigate a rash of dog thefts.

  In the course of that investigation, Virgil had broken the dog theft ring and had uncovered both a major meth mill and a murderous conspiracy run by the local school board. The school board and the local newspaper editor were serving thirty-year, no parole sentences at two different penitentiaries, and two other accessories were serving shorter sentences. He’d also acquired Honus the Dog.

  Because of that investigation and the prosecution that followed, Virgil was well known to Trippton and Trippton was reasonably well known to him. All of which made him wary of the whole private investigator problem.

  What in God’s name had the town gotten up to to attract a private eye from Los Angeles in the middle of the winter?

  —

  Johnson Johnson’s cabin fronted a backwater of the Mississippi, with a channel that led north to the main stream. That arrangement gave Johnson both immediate access to the water and also protection from the waves generated by the tow boats that pushed barges up and down the river during the open-water months.

  The driveway into the cabin had been neatly plowed, and Johnson’s truck sat parked in a clearing on the right side of the structure. Virgil parked beside it, got his bag and his shotgun, locked the 4Runner, and trudged up the steps to the front door. A sharp wind was blowing in from the northeast, which must have put the windchill in the minus numbers. When he opened the front door, he walked into a wave of heat that pushed at him like a warm mink muff.

  Johnson and his girlfriend, Clarice, were standing at the kitchen sink, shucking sweet corn.

  Johnson said, “Hey, man,” and Clarice said, “Hi, Virgie,” and Virgil asked, “Where in the heck did you get that corn?”

  “Picked this morning in Florida, flown straight into La Crosse by my old buddy Hank Johnson. He brings some every time he comes back,” Johnson Johnson said. “We’re having pheasant stew and sweet corn.”

  “He a relation?” Virgil asked, dumping his bag and shotgun next to the couch.

  Johnson frowned. “Why would he be?”

  “You’re both Johnsons,” Virgil said. “And he has an airplane.”

  “Virgil, every third person on the river is named Johnson.”

  “There is that,” Virgil said. He slipped his hand around Clarice’s waist and said, “How about a kiss, sugar bun?”

  She kissed him on the lips and said, “Maybe I’ll come back after Johnson’s asleep.” She was a pleasant but tough-looking blonde who could more than hold her own with Johnson.

  “I sleep with one eye open,” Johnson said. And, “Tell us who murdered Gina Hemming.”

  “I do want to hear about that,” Clarice said. “It was quite the shock.”

  “Give me a week,” Virgil said. “Then I’ll tell you. In the meantime, you guys are big gossips . . . What have you heard?”

  “I’m not a gossip,” Clarice said. “Johnson is, of course. I try to weed out the ridiculous bullshit he picks up, but even after that, I can tell you, there are still a whole bunch of suspects. Everybody’s pointing a finger at somebody else, so almost everybody in town has been pointed at. Including Johnson and me.”

  “Really?” Virgil said. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “Not that I recall,” Johnson said. “Maybe Clarice did. I can’t speak for her.”

  “Why you guys?”

  “Well, hmm. See, there’s this old couple, the Masons, retired twenty years ago, got some nice timber land up on the bluffs, mortgage with Second National with ten years to run,” Johnson said. “They missed some payments—one of their daughters said they were getting forgetful, another one said they might not have the money—and the bank was talking about foreclosing. Word kind of got around that Gina and her husband, Justine . . .”

  Clarice jumped in. “Used to be Justin. Soon to be her ex-husband.”

  “Everybody in town know that?” Virgil asked.

  “Yup, I think so,” Clarice said. “The tip-off came when Justine got publicly lovey-dovey with another guy, Rob. Hot Latin type. I don’t know his last name. Something not Latin.”

  “Anyway,” Johnson continued, “word got around that they could force a sale and were planning to buy it themselves and sell it off as hunting parcels. Got some nice whitetails in there, a few birds, woodcock, ruffed grouse. Like that. Anyway, I heard about it, slipped in and made a deal with the Masons . . . Besides the whitetails, there’s some great old walnut in there, and lots of good maple and oak. I covered the mortgage and gave them a down payment on a contract for deed. And I get to select-cut. As part of the deal, they get to stay put and pay nothing but taxes. And when the last one croaks or moves to the nursing home, I pay the rest of the purchase price to their kids and take possession. We both got a good deal.”

  “And that pissed off Hemming?”

  “Yeah. She got up in Clarice’s face down at Dunkin’ Donuts. So the next time I saw her, I gave her a piece of my mind,” Johnson said.

  “Called her a money-chokin’ bitch on wheels, is what he did,” Clarice said. “That’s a quote. Since he said it in the coffee shop, a lot of people heard him.”

  “Okay, so Johnson’s a suspect,” Virgil said. He yawned and stretched, and asked Clarice, “You think he could handle hard time?”

  “Probably. I could run the business while he was gone and we’d get rich. And we wouldn’t go wasting money on shit like airplanes,” Clarice said.

  Virgil looked at Johnson: “My God, Johnson, tell me it’s not true . . .”

  —

  Johnson told him about the airplane, a single-engine Beaver, currently being refurbished in Seattle. “When I go pick it up in the spring, I want you to come along,” he told Virgil. “Help me bring it back across the Rockies.”

  “Sure . . . when monkeys fly out of my ass,” Virgil said. “You already crashed two planes—”

  “Not ‘crashes,’ they were ‘forced landings,’” Johnson insisted. “When I get the Beaver down here, I can run us up to Lake of the Woods on weekends . . .”

  “Flying monkeys,” Virgil said.

  —

  They ate the sweet corn, which wasn’t as good as Midwestern sweet corn but was a lot better than no sweet corn at all, and the pheasant stew was perfect, a Northern Prairie equivalent to a Biloxi seafood gumbo. They were cleaning up the dishes, still talking about the Beaver and catching up with recent history, when Virgil took a call from the private detective.

  “I can’t find this Johnson place,” she said. “I’ve been driving up and down the highway.”

  “If you start at the Big Bill Boozy liquor store in Trippton and drive exactly one half mile north, you’ll go around a curve and see a fake yellow highway sign that says ‘Raccoon Crossing’ with the silhouette of a raccoon on it,” Virgil said.

  “I’ve seen that,” the woman said. She had a husky voice like she’d smoked too many unfiltered Camels.

  “That’s the entrance to Johnson’s driveway,” Virgil said. “We’re down here, washing dishes.”

  “Five minutes,” she said
.

  Virgil had explained about the detective during dinner, and Johnson now asked, “You want some privacy for this talk?”

  “No. I don’t want to talk to her at all,” Virgil said. “What I want to do is find Hemming’s killer, drop his ass in jail, and go home.”

  —

  They were still talking about nothing, still catching up, when headlights swept across the kitchen windows and Clarice said, “Here she is.” A moment later, the woman knocked once on the door and pushed through, carrying an oversized brown briefcase, and said to Johnson, “I’m Margaret S. Griffin. I hope you’re Virgil Flowers.”

  Johnson said, “Yes, I am. These are my friends Johnson Johnson and his illicit lover, Clarice—”

  “Shut up, Johnson,” Clarice said. She pointed at Virgil, who was drying a plate with a dish towel, and said, “This is Virgil. The big lug is Johnson. I’m Clarice. You want a beer? Or hot cider?”

  “I’d kill for a cider,” the woman said. She pulled off a knitted ski hat and unbuttoned her parka, which looked about two hours old. She was tall and solidly built, in her late thirties or early forties. She had dark brown hair with a flamed tint the color of an international orange life jacket. Striking, with a Mediterranean complexion, dark eyes and eyebrows. Gold nose ring, a short white scar on her chin. She was wearing skinny jeans, a wool turtleneck sweater, and on her feet the worst possible winter shoes, thin-soled flats.

  Clarice picked up on that and asked, “Where’re you from?”

  “Los Angeles,” Griffin said. She took the unoccupied kitchen chair and dropped into it. “I haven’t been this cold since . . . I’ve never been this cold. My butt feels like an ice cube, my toes are freezing off . . .”

  “If you’re gonna be around here, honey, you’ll need some different shoes—and I mean like right now—or you could lose those toes,” Clarice said. “When you’re done with Virgil, I’ll tell you where you can get some.”

  “Thanks. I want to wind this up and get back to L.A.,” Griffin said.

  “What are you doing?” Virgil asked. “I didn’t get an exact description of the problem.”

  “Virgil’s down here to solve a murder,” Clarice said. “It’ll take him a week or so.”

  Margaret Griffin seemed not impressed: “A murder? What happened?”

  Johnson told her, and she asked, “How’d she get in the river? As far as I could tell, the river is a solid chunk of ice.”

  Virgil nodded at her. “Excellent question. I will ask that tomorrow morning first thing. Now, what are you doing here?”

  “Trying to serve a federal cease-and-desist order,” Griffin said. “I’ve been here a week, and I get nothing but the runaround, including from the sheriff. I was out to where I think the target might be, a place called CarryTown, and a man came out of his mobile home and said if I kept sneaking around I could get hurt.”

  “That’s not good,” Clarice said.

  Virgil: “What are you trying to get stopped?”

  Griffin said, “I represent Mattel, the toy company. Maker of Barbie dolls.” She accepted a microwaved cider from Clarice, popped open her briefcase, and pulled out a Barbie doll—a nude one.

  “A regular old Barbie,” Clarice said. “I had about four of them when I was growing up. They broke a lot.”

  “Seeing one naked makes me feel kinda funny,” Johnson said.

  “You put your finger right on the problem,” Griffin said. “It’s not a regular Barbie.” She turned it over to show them a series of small holes drilled in Barbie’s back. And, below that, a pink plastic button.

  “What does that . . .” Clarice began.

  Griffin pushed the button, which operated a tiny digital recording. Barbie said, “Ohh, God. Ohh, God. Give it to me harder! Give it to me, big boy, harder. Ohh, God, you’re so big, don’t stop . . .”

  That went on for a while, then Barbie’s orgasm ran out of steam, ending with a vocal Erp. They all stared at the doll for a minute, Johnson finally saying to Clarice, “Some sonofabitch has recorded us, babe.”

  “In your dreams,” Clarice said.

  “Battery-operated,” Griffin said. “They call this one the Divine model because she says, ‘Ohh, God. Ohh, God.’ There’s a Negative model that says, ‘Ohh, no. Ohh, no,’ and a Positive model that says, ‘Ohh, yes. Ohh, yes.’”

  Clarice said, “There’s probably a fake orgasm one that says, ‘Ohh, Johnson. Ohh, Johnson.’”

  Johnson said, “Funny.”

  Clarice laughed merrily and said, “It really was. Sometimes, I slay myself.”

  —

  Will you guys take this seriously?” Griffin said. She looked around at them. “Somebody up here is manufacturing these things by the hundreds, the recorder components shipped in from China. They call them Barbie-Os. We leaned on a few Internet retailers and they pointed us at Trippton. I asked around, and nobody helps much, but I eventually came up with a name—Jesse McGovern. Can’t find her. Nobody seems to have heard of her. But how could you run an operation that makes hundreds of these things, in a town the size of Trippton, and nobody knows her?”

  “You know what I think?” Clarice said. “I think you have the wrong town. Between me and Johnson, we’ve lived here most of our lives. If there was a Jesse McGovern in town, we’d know her.”

  Johnson scratched his forehead. “There was a Jesse that lived down at the pumpkin farm . . .”

  “She’s long gone,” Clarice said. “That’s Jesse Hammer. She’s a nurse up in the Cities.”

  “Hammer doesn’t seem right,” Johnson said.

  Clarice: “That’s because she used to be Jesse Wagner before she got married. The Wagner pumpkin farm. She married Larry Hammer, Joe and Barb Hammer’s boy.”

  Johnson ticked a finger at her. “That’s right. I got it now.” They sounded so small-town that even Virgil was impressed.

  Griffin said, “That’s the first Jesse I’ve heard of. You’re sure she’s up in the Twin Cities?”

  “She was for sure,” Clarice said. “Her folks still live here, if you want to talk to them. The Wagner farm is a couple miles south, right down the highway. There’s a big orange plywood pumpkin sign out front. Can’t miss it.”

  “I might check with them,” Griffin said. “All I need to do is hand this Jesse a piece of paper. After that, I go home, and she goes to jail if they keep putting these things out. Mattel is really, really pissed. You can’t go around cutting up Barbie and Ken without taking some serious heat.”

  Clarice: “They cut up Ken?”

  Griffin hesitated, then dipped into her bag again and came up with a Ken doll, wrapped in newspaper. She pulled the newspaper off and put the doll next to Barbie.

  “My God,” Clarice said. “That’s not something you see every day.”

  “They call him Boner Ken,” Griffin said. Back to the bag, she pulled out the top of a Ken doll box. The regular label had been pasted over with a similarly colored patch that read “Boner Ken . . . the Ken of your dreams.”

  “Not very realistic,” Virgil said of the doll’s most prominent appendage.

  “I guess that would depend on . . . your personal . . . perspective,” Clarice said.

  —

  Griffin said that she was staying at Ma and Pa Kettle’s River Resort, which was, she said, eight rooms behind Ma and Pa Kettle’s Restaurant and Lounge.

  “Stay away from the vodka,” Virgil said. “It might have a few uncertified ingredients.”

  “I’d be happy to stay away from the whole damn state if I can find Jesse McGovern . . .”

  Clarice: “Say, does Ken talk?”

  Griffin said, “Some do. Not this one. But they’re all special,” she said. Ken’s most prominent appendage was upright, and she pushed it down: another switch. Ken’s head began to vibrate.

  They all looked at it for a mo
ment, then Clarice said, “Ohh!”

  Virgil: “I always assumed Ken was gay. But that . . .”

  “There’s also a Missionary model, and a BJ model, which is their most extreme version. Those do have recorded messages, and they all vibrate,” Griffin said. “You wouldn’t want to hear what they say.”

  “I kinda would,” Johnson said.

  “He’s a pervert,” Clarice said to Griffin. “That’s why I stay with him.”

  Griffin gave Johnson a testing look and said, “I can see that in him. You’re a lucky girl.”

  “Everybody, shut up,” Virgil said. To Griffin: “What exactly have you done so far?”

  Griffin outlined her investigation, which had produced nothing useful, except some UPS shipping labels that came from a variety of towns, all in a wide half circle around Trippton, but none from the Wisconsin side of the river.

  When she was done, Virgil said he’d make some calls to his sources in Trippton, and back her up if she found anything on her own. Clarice told Griffin about an outdoor store where she could get some boots and how to get there. “Buy some Sorel’s. S-o-r-e-l.”

  “I will,” Griffin said. “I hope I can get out the driveway.”

  “You got a rental?” Johnson asked.

  “Yeah, a Prius.”

  “Jeez, that’s like driving an ice skate,” Johnson said. “Got those hard little tires . . . You better not be on the road if it starts snowing.”

  —

  Griffin finished her hot cider, pulled on her coat, said, “Back to the iceberg,” and left. They watched from the window until she turned onto the highway, and Virgil looked at the other two and said, “You guys were lying through your goddamn teeth. Where’s Jesse McGovern?”

  “Couldn’t tell you that,” Johnson said. Clarice shook her head.

  “What’s going on here?” Virgil said. “Goddamnit, Johnson . . .”

  Clarice said, “You haven’t been here much in the winter. Next time you drive through town, check it out. If you don’t already have a job here, there’s none to be had, unless somebody dies. Jesse’s found a way to bring in some money for a dozen or so folks that don’t have any. I’ll tell you, Virgil, you’re a good friend and all, Johnson’s best friend, but you won’t find out about Jesse from us.”